DOJ Erases January 6 Records as It Prepares to Pay the Rioters
There is a kind of confession that arrives dressed as a boast, the type that has become all too common under the USA’s current president Donald Trump. On Friday, the U.S. Department of Justice gave us yet another one.
Meryl Kornfield, a Washington Post reporter, had noticed the Trump regime quietly deleting January 6 records from the DOJ’s own website. As an example she pointed to one deleted press release: the sentencing of a man who came to the Capitol with bear spray and a metal whip while out on bail for soliciting a child. She posted the before and after.
DOJ could have said nothing. Instead it posted to social media, admitting to deleting the files, which is likely an illegal act.
In the case of Andrew Taake, on June 5, 2024, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for D.C. announced he had been sentenced to 74 months in prison after pleading guilty to assaulting officers with a dangerous weapon. He was among the first to breach the perimeter of the Capitol during the January 6 riots, he sprayed lines of police with bear spray, closing to thirty feet, to twenty, to ten, a metal whip in one hand and the canister in the other.
The judge who sentenced him, Carl Nichols, was a Trump appointee. He called Taake’s conduct as serious as any January 6 defendant he had sentenced, and the farthest thing from First Amendment expression.
And the detail that turns this from grim to obscene: when Taake came to attack police, he was already out on bond on a 2016 charge of soliciting a minor, prosecutors say he sent explicit messages to an undercover officer posing as a fifteen-year-old girl. Then Trump pardoned him. He walked out of federal prison in Colorado in early 2025, and Texas authorities arrested him weeks later on that same child solicitation charge. The Harris County District Attorney, Sean Teare, thanked the officers who got, in his words, a suspected child predator back into custody. Convicted, pardoned, freed, re-arrested. This is the press release the Justice Department decided was propaganda.
The account explained itself. “We are proud to reverse the DOJ’s weaponization under the Biden administration. We will do everything in our power to make whole those who were persecuted for political purposes. This includes stripping DOJ’s website of partisan propaganda.”
The court record of a guilty plea, entered before a Trump-appointed judge, captured on police body cameras, is “partisan propaganda.” The men who attacked police were not defendants, they were “persecuted,” and the state owes them to be made “whole.”
NBC News checked: the vast majority of January 6 press releases have been pulled. This is the systematic erasure of the largest prosecution in the department’s history, narrated as a some virtue against the former President, when it was a series of crimes kicked off by the current President. We saw the opening act in January 2025, when DOJ pulled its entire database of 1,500-plus cases without notifying the national archivist, as the law requires.
The erasures run in parallel with a new $1.776 billion fund to compensate people who say they were victims of a “weaponised” justice system, which is to say, the people prosecuted for the January 6 insurrection. The fund was not born of any independent finding. It was born of Trump’s own lawsuit, the one he brought against the IRS over the leak of his tax returns, settled by a Justice Department he controls, paid from a public purse he does not own. The money comes from the Treasury's Judgment Fund, the standing account meant to settle the government's genuine legal debts. And the sum, $1.776 billion, was not calculated against any harm. It is the year 1776, the founding turned into a price tag, a number chosen to sound like patriotism.
Pressed in the Senate on May 19, the acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, would not say the rioters were excluded. “Anybody in this country can apply,” he offered, and a commission would set the rules, the same commission whose board the attorney general appoints and the president can fire. JD Vance, asked the same day, declined to rule it out: “I’m not committing to giving anybody money or committing to giving no one money.” Two officers who defended the Capitol, Harry Dunn and Daniel Hodges, are suing to stop the fund, arguing it would finance the rioters and legitimize political violence.
The government is deleting the record of what these men did. And it is preparing to pay them, as victims, more than one and a half billion dollars. First you make the crime disappear. Then you make the criminal whole.
When a government destroys the record of crimes committed on its behalf, announces it is proud to have done so, and moves to pay the perpetrators from the public purse, that is the conduct of a regime. We use the word for any government that turns on the people it claims to represent, whether it sits in Tehran, Tel Aviv, or Washington. We do not reserve it for the enemies of the West. We apply it to the West when the West earns it.
The DOJ will get their due for this absolute Trumpy bullshit. It is so wrong ther earen't words for it.